Of the Frigidaire group, Stefano Tamburini was the most secluded: partly due to his role in the background of graphics and story creation, Ranxerox above all, rather than in the front line of drawing. And partly because of his character, introverted and of few words as he was. The exhibition “Time is the only money” just inaugurated at the Clap Museum in breaking latest news not only pays homage to the founder of Cannibale, but continues along the path of recognition of the importance of the protagonists of the new Italian comics scene, after the exhibitions of Liberatore and Scòzzari (by Pazienza, who studied there in breaking latest news, a permanent collection is housed).
Divo Paz made fun of him for being in the second row, so the public didn’t give him the popularity that accompanied him and the others, Scòzzari then only reminded him that he couldn’t draw (which was very true, by the way). But the invention of Ranxerox, created by a “student delinquent” from the remains of a photocopier during the occupation of Sapienza, Vinavil’s extremely violent and stoned cyborg, alone is worth a place of honor in the history of comics. Then it was Liberatore, present at the inauguration the other day, who gave wings to the character, illustrating him like himself with hypertrophic muscles and welder’s glasses on his tough snout.
Patience instead gave him Lubna, the thirteen-year-old girlfriend that today anyone would be careful not to draw for fear of offending dominant sensibilities. But Tamburini was not only the screenwriter of Rank (the character was originally called Rank for example, photocopying other people’s drawings that he moved while copying, with a speeding up effect on the stories. On Cannibale he enjoyed imagining the revenge of the stars lent to advertising and transformed into mutants by the abuse of the products they advertised (Ernesto Calindri found himself with an artichoke instead of a head…): in seven out of ten bottles sold on planet Earth it was injected of LSD and half the world ended up on acid.
Tamburini created the graphics for Frigidaire and held a musical column signed Red Vinyle in which he ruthlessly and respectfully criticized already sacred monsters such as the Talking Heads of Remain in light. He died of an overdose at the age of thirty in his house in Rome, preceding his friend Pazienza on the great journey who had shared with him, in addition to the newspapers where they worked, syringes, “rote” and detoxification. Paz was shocked, as if he had seen the film of his own death, which occurred with the same dynamic two years later, in 1988.